Customer Reviews

My Best Self-Working Card Tricks (Dover Magic Books)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a very good book for anyone who does not want to put in the hours it takes to become a sleight-of-hand card magician. Many of the effects in this book come from a magazine that was published by the author, which is considered one of the greatest sources for magical material ever!
Many of the effects in the book require no skill, just a careful management of your audience and attention to detail. Most will fool knowledgable magicians, especially those who depend on sleights and not mathematics.
An excellent book for a beginning magician, but not for those who are under 12, since most of the material requires strict adherence to directions.
Check out the last chapter for some excellent routines that duplicate sleight-of-hand magic, but don't use it.

Don't know why anyone would have trouble understanding or using the effects in this book. Frankly, with a little bit of presentation and performance, these are some nice workers. Magicians who perform for a living know Fulves' material is strong. True, his style is a bit dry, but no problem for someone with good reading skils.

Out of the sixty-five tricks listed in the book, I found about ten that were worth attempting. I like to do tricks on a spur of the moment with a borrowed deck, and this book added very little to my repetoire. There are too many tricks which need a setup or require you to mark cards beforehand. Also, alot of the tricks have too many steps (your audience will get bored, just as mine did). My final say is don't buy this book, it's not worth it; get a good sleight-of-hand video instead.

Wow, what i surprise that these books are still in print. And even more, other people have given other Karl Fulves books a rating of 5 stars. Here is why i don't like any of Fulves Self working books:

1. Way to expensive for tiny books with bad material. these cost 6 dollars for 128 pages while the superb book MOdern coin magic costs only 10 with 320 pages of priceless information.

2. Most importantly, the tricks aren't very good. My mom bought 5 of the self-working books so i understand very well what these books are like. I have spent days on some of Fulves card tricks reading through them and then performing them to many people. Either everyone figured them out or else the tricks were mathematical in which the audience wouldn't care. Magic tricks need to be impossible, magical which decieves the eyes. Mathematical tricks are NOT atall magical. It seems like all the tricks are really old out dated tricks just so that the author could say that this trick is in print for the first time. The best tricks are however classics, in which many books have these. I felt like Dover books were really awful after reading these books until i bought Modern coin magic, a fantastic book in which the tricks are both magical and fool people. All of my self working books where left in Madagscar when i moved. Before i didn't like card tricks because of this book until a friend showed me some sleight of hand. I never got one good trick out of 5 books by Karl Fulves, except for the cups and balls. 3. Self working tricks in general don't work. In self working, there aren't any sleights or gimmicks. Time has shown that the classic, or the best tricks that have proven the test of time, have either for the most part sleights or gimmichs and in the most part are not self working. By not including classics inorder to be origional, the book contains bad tricks. 4. Get the royal road in card magic, Mark wilson cyclopedia of magic, and bobo's modern coin magic for great classic tricks and card tricks that have stood the test of time which proffessionals use. Hope this helps.